text: In mid-1943 the Australian War Cabinet decided to produce penicillin in Australia. Colonel E. V. (Bill) Keogh, the Australian Army's Director of Hygiene and Pathology, was placed in charge of the effort. Keogh summoned Captain Percival Bazeley, with whom he had worked at the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) before the war, and Lieutenant H. H. Kretchmar, a chemist, and directed them to establish a production facility by Christmas. They set off on a fact-finding mission to the United States, where they visited NRRL and obtained penicillin cultures from Coghill. They also inspected the Pfizer plant in Brooklyn and the Merck plant at Rahway, New Jersey. A production plant was established at the CSL facilities in Parkville, Victoria, and the first Australian-made penicillin began reaching the troops in New Guinea in December 1943. By 1944, CSL was producing 400 million Oxford units per week, and there was sufficient penicillin production to allocate some for civilian use.
  Wartime production in Australia was in bottles and flasks, but Bazeley made a second tour of facilities in the United States between September 1944 and March 1945 and was impressed by the progress made on deep submergence technology. In 1946 and 1947 he created a pilot deep submerged plant at CSL using small  tanks to gain experience with the technique. Two  tanks became operational in 1948, followed by eight more. During the 1950s and 1960s, CSL produced semisynthetic penicillin as well. Penicillin was also produced by F.H. Faulding in South Australia, Abbott Laboratories in New South Wales and Glaxo in Victoria. By the 1970s there was a worldwide glut of penicillin, and Glaxo ceased production in 1975 and CSL in 1980.